Eugene weekly., September 21, 2023, Page 9, Image 9

but the Victor family was interned at a detention camp named
Tiscornia. According to the German American Internee
Coalition, the Cuban government (in cooperation with the
U.S. government that helped pay for the program) interned
114 Germans, 350 Japanese and 13 Italian Cuban resident
aliens at the camp during World War II.
“That was a completely foreign land,” Goldrich says,
but adds with a chuckle that her sister Ursula did develop
a taste for avocados during the two-week stay.
Upon release from the detention camp, the Victor
family went to Santiago de los Caballeros in the Domini-
can Republic. Victor spoke fluent Spanish, and the family
settled for nine months.
“It was not torture,” Goldrich says of the time in the
Dominican Republic. “It was pretty good.”
Finally, in April 1941, visas were issued for the Victor
family and they set sail to New York City via Puerto Rico.
They would settle first in the Kew Gardens section of
Queens, New York, then in Westchester County, and they
would go on to productive lives.
LIFE IN THE U.S.
THE STOLPERSTEINE STONES HONORING THE VICTOR FAMILY IN HEILBRONN ON JUNE 29 Photo courtesy Hannah Goldrich
So began Goldrich’s remarks, and so began the Victor
family’s journey.
Later in 1935 Jews were barred from serving in the
German military, and the Nuremberg Laws were enacted
under which Jewish people were no longer considered
German citizens. The following year saw Jewish doctors
banned from practicing in German institutions and the
opening of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp,
among other indignities. The Buchenwald concentra-
tion camp opened in 1937.
The pure hatred of Jews in Germany had been evident
throughout the early 1930s, as German author Hans
Franke noted in his 1963 book The History and the Fate
of the Jews in Heilbronn. There were boycotts of Jewish
shops and businesses, public burnings of books writ-
ten by Jews, public insults hurled at Jews and violent
assaults on Jewish people.
Of a terrorizing incident in 1931, Franke recounted
that “students occupied all of the entrances to the Berlin
University and assaulted all of the students who looked
Jewish, quite a few of whom had to be taken to the hospital.
Although this attack went on for some hours, the president
of the university made no effort to contact the police!”
And of the boycotts, Franke wrote: “It can be shown
statistically that before 1933 this insidious boycott was
already severely affecting the Jewish population. Because
of this boycott, unemployment rose at a faster than aver-
age rate, particularly among the Jewish intelligentsia.
Also, Jewish shopkeepers became poorer and already
were being cut off from their means of support.”
Max Victor — an economics professor with a Ph.D.
from Heidelberg University — was clearly among the
intelligentsia. He was forced out of his teaching posi-
tion and had to find work anywhere he could. There
was nowhere left to turn in 1937, so he left for the U.S. to
begin the process of obtaining visas for the family (he
had a sister in New York City) while Trude, Ursula and
Hannah traveled to Switzerland, where Max had set up
a Swiss bank account.
That would not be a simple process. The United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., notes
that between 1938 and 1941, “U.S. law allowed only 27,370
immigration visas per year to be issued to people born
in Germany or Austria. If you wanted to present your
paperwork and be interviewed by the U.S. consulate in
the hope of getting a visa, you needed to register and
join the waiting list.”
E U G E N E W E E K LY . C O M
The Victor family reunited in Amsterdam in the spring
of 1937, then moved to Ardenhaudt, Holland. From there,
it moved to Chipstead, in Surrey County, England, in 1939.
Between the Holland and English dates — “The fateful
year of 1938,” as Franke put it — there was Kristallnacht
Nov. 9 and 10. It was the state’s response to the assassi-
nation in Paris of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by
Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew.
The Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles notes that
200 synagogues were destroyed, 7,500 shops were looted
and 30,000 male Jews were sent to concentration camps
during the two-day rampage. The riot was supposed to
look like an unplanned outburst of anger toward the
Jewish people. “In reality, Kristallnacht was state-spon-
sored vandalism and arson,” responds the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum. “Nazi leaders actively coordinated
it with Adolf Hitler’s support.”
The Victor family was away from that, but it had a
voyage to Cuba in 1940 aboard the SS Orduna to worry
about. It was not a given that the family or other passen-
gers would step foot in Havana.
In 1939 the German liner MS St. Louis set sail from
Hamburg, Germany, to Cuba with 937 passengers, almost
all of them Jewish. The passengers learned upon their
arrival that the Cuban government had canceled visas
for all the passengers and were demanding a $1 million
ransom to disembark.
This was the “Voyage of the Damned,” a voyage made
famous by a 1974 book of the same name by authors Max
Morgan-Witts and Gordon Thomas and made into a 1976
movie, also with the same name.
The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center
in Skokie, Illinois, explains in its current exhibit that the
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC)
attempted to negotiate with the Cuban government,
but it backed away for fear that “paying would encour-
age other regimes.”
“The ship’s sympathetic captain delayed returning to
Germany, sailing towards Florida while the JDC appealed
to the U.S. and other governments. America refused to
relax its immigration quotas.”
Great Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands
each admitted a percentage of passengers upon the
ship’s return to Europe. Still, the U.S. Holocaust Memo-
rial Museum notes that 254 passengers on the St. Louis
were killed in the Holocaust.
The SS Orduna did not have the problems of the St. Louis,
In 2004 the Hannah Goldrich 50 Year Jewelry Retro-
spective was held at the late and lamented Jacobs Gallery
in Eugene. She told Eugene poet Maxine Scates in an
introductory artist statement that Holocaust-era refu-
gees often became artists “because it’s a way of being
remembered — your work will exist even if you don’t.”
She added that “I want my work to last forever, to be
passed down through the generations.”
Almost 20 years later, nothing has changed for Goldrich
on that front. She smiles at the thought. “I see my work all
over, all the time,” she says. “I see ears before I see faces.”
Goldrich did not set out to become a jeweler. She
graduated from Antioch College in Ohio, a private liberal
arts school, and later earned a master’s in secondary
education at Harvard, but the art of jewelry making was
too much of a pull to ignore.
While jewelry making was not in the family’s history,
art itself certainly was. Max Victor would retire from the
leather business in the U.S. and spend the remaining
13 years of his life painting before dying at age 83, and
Goldrich fondly recalls visiting art galleries and muse-
ums with her father as a young girl.
“His love was art and he was an art collector,” Gold-
rich says.
Trude Victor was a gymnast in Germany, and in the U.S.
she worked in physical therapy, primarily with children
diagnosed with cerebral palsy, and lived to age 99. Ursula
Victor Santer would go on to earn a Ph.D. in microbiology
at Yale University. She died of cancer in 2003 at age 70.
Neither the parents nor the Jewish community they
lived in spoke much of the war, the Holocaust or of being
exiled, Goldrich says. “Everybody knew,” she points out,
and everyone had to rebuild.
“They managed to have very good lives, which they
deserved,” Goldrich says of her parents. “In retrospect,
it was hard for them, but they were exceptional people.”
Two of many exceptional people, notes Rabbi Ruhi
Sophia. Ruhi Sophia recently officiated the memorial
service of a 101-year-old Jewish woman who came to the
U.S. from Europe in 1941 as a 17-year-old girl.
“There were survivors who didn’t tell their stories,”
says Sophia, who uses the biblical Hebrew word Sho’ah
(catastrophe) rather than the English word Holocaust
(derived from the Greek holokauston, a translation of
the Hebrew word ‘olah, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered
whole to God). “As we lose them to old age, it's impor-
tant to remember that the Sho’ah was perpetuated by
humans against other humans.” While the Sho’ah can be
seen as an event that came out of nowhere, Ruhi Sophia
adds, “Any society can be susceptible.”
Goldrich echoed that sentiment June 29 in her
prepared remarks in Heilbronn.
“The displays in many museums, the Holocaust, memo-
rials and now the Stolpersteine project are a model for the
horrendous costs of war,” she said. “Our country could
learn from these efforts for our blunders.”
Zikhrono livrakha. May the memory of those lost to
the Holocaust or exiled in World War II be a blessing. ■
S E P T E M B E R
2 1 ,
2 0 2 3
9